Danny Fortson (1:49)
hello and welcome to the Times Tech Podcast with me, Danny Fortson and only me today as Katie is away for a couple weeks. Sadly, it means that unlike last week's episode where we talked about cricket and my weekend in the mountains, there will be none of that. But even if there is no cricket, there is never a dull day out here in Silicon Valley. On today's episode I've been speaking to Sam Rodriguez, a physicist, bioengineer and co founder and CEO of Future House. This is a nonprofit based in San Francisco that aims to build an AI scientist. But for what exactly? That is the $64,000 question and one that I put to him. That's coming up in a little bit, but before we get there I want to pick up on a few of the Big stories that are kind of happening out here and there's a lot going on. So right at the top, firstly, last week, Katie and I spoke about the poaching of the best AI talent in Silicon Valley, this huge talent war that has broken out here. Sam Altman talked about this in a leaked memo where he said, quote, what Meta is doing will, in my opinion, lead to very deep cultural problems. And of course, Meta, he's talking about Mark Zuckerberg throwing around nine figure salaries or pay packages for the top engineers, treating these guys like LeBron James or Ronaldo or Messi or pick your top sporting hero. That's what he's paying these guys to build what he says will be the future. From Meta's perspective, they're like, look, we're not paying every AI engineer $200 million. What we are trying to do is basically assemble an all star team. These are pretty rare. We're paying the all stars, like all stars, that in the context of the opportunity, this makes sense. And he doubled down this week. Zuckerberg did. In a Threads post. He said he's gonna spend hundreds of billions of dollars building huge data centers all over the U.S. now, the question is, what is his game plan here? And I think it's scorched earth. It's basically to scare the bejesus out of the rest of the industry while also trying to attract the best people. Being like, I'm gonna pay you top dollar and I'm gonna spend more than anybody else. So that is to individuals paying up to 200 million for one guy, apparently this Apple engineer named Ruming Peng. And then he's talking about data centers the size of Manhattan. It's insane. And just two thoughts on what is happening in this kind of crazy AI war that has broken out. One is, when you're thinking about Zuckerberg, think about the Metaverse. Remember the metaverse? Zuckerberg spent $50 billion on the metaverse trying to get us all to, you know, don glasses and goggles. And if you recall, it wasn't that long ago he was doing these demos where he'd show up in some virtual meeting room with him and a bunch of other avatars with no legs and be like, oh, look, this is the future, et cetera. It was all very, very cringy. It didn't work and it cost $50 billion. In other words, money is not the salve. That is, just because you have more money and willingness to spend it does not mean you will win. To wit, a senior engineer at Meta wrote a scathing letter on his way out of the company last week, and it was leaked to the information. And in this letter, he wrote about this culture of fear inside Meta. All the bad vibes, he said, were, quote, spreading like cancer. Nobody knows what Meta's mission is. If you ask Zuckerberg, he says, I've created this new superintelligence lab. We're going to build super intelligence. I think this is more like a signpost for, if you want to build really ambitious stuff, talent, come to me. In response to the leaking of that, Meta said, we're excited about our recent changes, new hires in leadership and research, and continued work to create an ideal environment for revolutionary research. But the whole idea does not seem to be landing the lease, certainly with this one guy. And it just went viral as people were talking about, you know, what Meta is trying to do, what Zuckerberg is trying to do. So money isn't everything. It's a lot, but it's not everything. It'll be interesting to see if Zuckerberg can kind of pull it off and get Meta right back at the top of the race. In terms of AI, that is one story which leads to this other story, which is so crazy and very, very Silicon Valley and really kind of captures what's happening out here. And that's about this company called Windsurf. You may not have heard of them. You may have a quick recap. Windsurf is this very buzzy AI coding startup that a few months ago in April, Sam Altman at OpenAI said he's, they're gonna buy that for $3 billion. You're like, oh, great. Cool. However, that deal swiftly got stuck because an issue between them and Microsoft, which is, of course, OpenAI's biggest investor and number one frenemy. And the whole thing kind of got stuck in the mud because there was an issue between OpenAI and Microsoft over who would or would not have access to the service once the deal was done. The deal stalled in the middle of that Anthropic, our friends at Anthropic, Dario Amade and crew, which Windsurf uses to build on top of. They use Claude Anthropics to build on top of. They were like, you know what? We don't want to help create a product that is going to end up getting sold by our bitter rival, OpenAI. So they just cut off access to their LLMs, which meant all of a sudden Windsurf had to scramble, had to retool and made everything much more complicated. And so they're kind of panicking Trying to retool on the fly. This deal is stuck. And then all of a sudden, last week, 40 top windsurf engineers get this interesting email, say, show up at this hotel in Mountain View. So they do. They all just kind of troop out. They walk in and who's there? Their CEO, and next to him is Sergey Brin, Google's founder and the 10th richest man on the planet. And he's saying, we'll hire you, we'll double your pay, you know, your shares, your salary, et cetera. Come with us. They basically all agree the total price is $2.4 billion for these 40 folks and some licensing fees. Meanwhile, back at windsurf, there's 200 people who are like, why is a fifth of our company just not here? That's strange. And then they hear about this deal where the CEO and the top people have all left, taken Google's money. So then the people at Windsurf are basically like, oh, no, we're manning a ghost ship because Anthropica's cut us off. Our CEO and our top team have left, and now we don't know what to do. The new CEO, who's been in the job about two minutes, he then scrambles, has all week negotiations, and ends up getting bought by another coding startup called Cognition in a shotgun marriage. Crazy. So just a few kind of lessons I feel like worth drawing out there is that Silicon Valley is really losing its mind right now. This is proper bubble stuff. It's also getting very, very messy. These top AI developers trying to grab the best talent. And most interestingly, for the kind of the bubble aspect of things, it shows the fragility of a lot of these startups, which are basically building what they call wrappers around other people's technology. This is a lesson that media companies have had to learn time and again around building businesses on top of other people's tech stacks. In the case of social media, it was news feeds and algorithms that if they get changed, if they are altered, if Mark Zuckerberg wakes up and decides he wants to do something different, all of a sudden you have no business, and there are so many AI startups in that boat. And Windsurf has managed to find a landing spot, but it was just one small example of just be careful. You have to really do something special. You can't just build on top of other people's stuff because they can change their mind, and all of a sudden, you're up a famous creek. And then lastly, last story before we get to today's interview. Nvidia is starting to ship chips to China again. Big reversal from the Trump administration. After months of saying, no, you cannot send these powerful chips to China. They now can. Jensen Wang, the CEO, he had been doing a lot of lobbying, and it's a really big deal for the Trump administration to be like, look, this is a war for supremacy. We're talking about warfare. We're talking about new weapons. We don't want to give them our best stuff to then so that they can build their own weapons, their own AI systems that are as good as ours. But now Nvidia is starting to ship chips to China again, selling H20 chips, which are not their most. Most powerful, but they're very powerful. And the reasoning, I think, is that they're saying, look, we want the world's AI systems to be built with American technology. We don't want to hand the market to our Chinese rivals like Huawei. So we should be in the game. We should be in the arena. Yes, there are dangers here, but there is kind of a risk worth taking. We'll see. We'll see. But that was the other big deal for Nvidia, which, of course, recently crossed the $4 trillion market value threshold. So it's wild out here, y'. All. There's a lot of things happening. It feels like every time you turn around, you hear another just crazy story that I think I mentioned it before. It does feel to me, having started my career because I'm old in 2000, effectively, it feels a lot like that. Just the kind of every day you wake up and hear something crazy. A new story, a new valuation, a new takeover, whatever it may be. And it'll be interesting to see how it all turns out.
